It turns out there are few things that are more chaotic than that of a human heart. Speeding up, slowing down, pretty face, flight of stairs, it’s always changing no matter what happens. It’s an erratic son of a bitch . But underneath all that bump to bump mess, there is in fact, a pattern, the truth. And it’s love. Most important thing about love is we choose to give it. And we choose to receive it, making it the least random act in the entire universe. It transcends blood, it transcends betrayal, and all that dirt that makes us human. If you can figure that out, Jake’s got nothing on you.
~Daniel Taplitz

Like this:

“These little victories are making me happy!” said Phil. He weighs around 340lbs and he’s been on a juice diet for about 10 days. For him, a small victory was losing 17lbs and sharing his new juice diet to a neighbor on the 4th of July. He’s a truck driver, has health issues and meets an Australian that changes his life. Only about 15 minutes into watching this movie, I was so motivated and reinvested in my nutrition that I got off the couch, grabbed my purse and drove to Costco to buy a juicer!

Thankfully, Costco didn’t let me down. The juicer was large enough for a whole apple but small enough not to need it’s own zip code in my kitchen. With the new Jack LaLanne Juicer nicely packed in the front seat of my truck, I opened the box to flip through the recipe book and jotted down my grocery list. Normally I get all of my groceries from Whole Foods but since I was ONLY getting vegetables this time, I decided to stay close to home and headed to Grand Mart. There are so many selections there and I believe their produce is mostly local. My grocery list:

5 apples

5 lemons

2 limes

3 oranges

1 cucumber

strawberries

raspberries (sadly none there today)

celery

lettuce

ginger

carrot

mint

The two recipes I chose for today were Orangeberry, a Digestive Jump Start juice for dinner and Clear Shock, a Cucumber Spa Cocktail for lunch tomorrow. I made both including cleaning in about 30 minutes and even cleaned off a new spot for it on the counter. Spinach salad with tomatoes, goat cheese, cranberries, pine nuts, cashews and blueberry dressing was my dinner and Orangeberry was my dessert as I watched the rest of “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead” on Netflix.

The juicing process was actually much easier than I thought and I was surprised to see how much of the fruity flesh was left after the juice was extracted. There was a little bit of cleanup but I was able to dump the pulp in my compost pile and stick to my goal of simple and green in my house.

There are a few things I’m trying to achieve this year. Maintain a healthy weight through changing my diet (specifically pescatarian), creating more space in my house and living more simply by getting rid of things that I don’t need and spending more time active by joining clubs and groups like meetup and traveling around the world. Today I’m kicking off my 10 day veggie/fruit fasting and then I’ll try fasting with only vegetable and fruit juices at least one meal a day. My little victories will make me happy too!

The debate and struggle in the school system over music education may get a little twist. Students from the Stanford Laptop Orchestra create music with their laptops instead of instruments. Ge Wang, the orchestra’s founder, has worked with students from music to engineering to develop their own software language, Chuck, to create and generate the unique sounds and equipment necessary to build a sound unlike anything you’ve heard. This musical group has been performing at colleges and city parks as you’ll see on YouTube. There’s a performance at Macworld and Apple has even dedicated a page on Musical Macs. Although the sounds they produce may not be a symphony or pop tune you can pick out, it goes to show you that even the most technologically minded people get together to be creative, they might call it music.

The real reason I wanted to write this blog was not to share yet another link to YouTube or Apple. I wanted to pose the question to encourage thought about musical expression and how you may define it. It goes without saying everyone has a different idea of what good music is but we usually agree that it’s music.

So what defines music? Does it require an instrument? What defines an instrument? Can a computer or software program replace an instrument like a piano or a flute? I would challenge the assumption that music requires an instrument at all. Child prodigy August Rush heard music in a field of grass and created sounds I’d never heard from a guitar he didn’t even know how to play. Yes, the movie is fiction but the message is very real.

Music is an art. Art is interpretation. You may interpret what you hear differently one day to the next but the vehicle that produces that sound isn’t restricted to only the ones you know today. Sound can be a means of expressing a feeling or a tone whether it is in the form of a song or simply the inflection of your voice. So it must mean that like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, sound is music to the listening ear. So what have you heard from your toaster today?